Epson B-500dn review

While the D120 is a conventional budget inkjet aimed at business users, its big brother the B-500 is a more imposing machine that offers a serious challenge to the assumption that office users need a laser printer.

Big and chunky, with a high-capacity input tray and business-oriented features such as built-in networking, the B-500 is made to handle up to 10,000 pages a month at high speeds. Epson reckons it can churn out 37 pages of black text per minute in draft mode, and 32 even at the normal quality setting. That would be more than a match for affordable lasers.

Needless to say, we didn't take their word for it. In our own speed tests, a 10 page text document came out in 29 seconds, equivalent to a rather more modest 21ppm. That's still very fast, and quicker than the Lexmark C530 colour laser.

Another key concern for small businesses is cost. Traditionally, this is where lasers offer advantages over inkjet printers. But with its high-capacity cartridges yielding up to 8000 pages for black output and 7000 for colour, Epson calculates that the B-500's costs work out at around 2.5p for a page of mixed text and colour graphics. That's well into laser territory.

Nor did these impressive results come at the expense of image quality. Our 6x4 inch colour photos looked vibrant but not over-saturated, with no banding visible, and they were produced in a startlingly quick two minutes and four seconds. This is partly thanks to the B-500's inch-wide print head, which enables it to lay down more ink in a single pass than most rivals, significantly reducing print times.

What didn't make us so happy was the hullabaloo the Epson created in its mission to dash off those pages so quickly. No two ways about it: this printer is noisy. That's fine if you plan to use its networking facility to stick it in an out-of-the-way corner of the office, hooked up to your router or a network socket rather than directly to a PC, but we wouldn't recommend keeping it on the desk where you work, unless you weren't going to use it very often - which would defeat its purpose.

In its hurry to print, the B-500 also seemed a little careless. Its paper feeding mechanism really snatches sheets from the input tray, and this caused a handful of paper jams - not enough to put us off completely, but enough to give us more hassle than any other printer here. Overall, then, the Epson is fairly convincing as a business printer, but not perfect - and at the price, it darn well ought to be.